Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film, theatre, and television that are heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.
Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).
Seward Plantation House, Independence, a strictly fantastical one.
Eudora Welty was labeled a Southern Gothic author, though she disliked the label
Cherie Priest has been identified as a modern Southern Gothic writer
Since at least the 18th century, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes an audience feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.
Grotesque studies, Michelangelo
Roman frescos in Nero's Domus Aurea, Rome, unknown painter, c. 64–68 AD
Ceiling of the Piccolomini Library, Siena Cathedral, Siena, Italy, by Pinturicchio and his assistants, 1502–1503
Pilgrim bottle, by the Fontana workshop from Urbino, Italy, c. 1560–1570, tin glazed earthenware (majolica), Victoria and Albert Museum, London